But the relationship between emotion and reasoning, and therefore emotion and political judgment, is much more complex than the common view that emotion is detrimental to reasoning. As neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have shown, individuals with damage in the emotional centers of their brains have a very difficult time making rational choices, largely because they don’t have emotions to make sure they make choices that aren’t harmful.

TruthDig: Two Weeks in Iraq
One incident described: An innocent family man arrested by the U.S. because he has the same name as the intended target. When we discovered their mistake, they left him in prison for several more days. The actual target? A teenager US intelligence thought was a terrorist because they had evesdropped on him discussing his favorite video games.

An epidemic of sexual violence during 15 years of lawlessness in Somalia was among the factors that strengthened opposition to this city’s notorious warlords, residents said. The Islamic militias who drove them out in months of recent fighting were embraced as keepers of public order, as a force strong enough and pious enough to keep Mogadishu’s daughters safe.

Wifework explains the two trends of happily submissive wives, and embittered divorced MRAs, with one fell swoop. Maushart’s crucial observation is that even though most marriages aren’t really very egalitarian, we have a lot invested in the illusion of equality. Actively maintaining the illusion of an equal, happy marriage is part of wifework. If a wife does a good job, her husband has absolutely no idea that their marriage is unequal or unhappy – which means that many men are completely blindsided when their wives decide to stop doing the wifework and get a divorce. Male privilege plays a role in this blindness, of course, but this is one of many cases where women collude in their own oppression.

The Use and Abuse of Doctrine
It’s useful to read something like this once in a while, to be reminded that not all evangelical Christians are right-wing poopyheads (no insult to any r.w.p.s who happen to be reading this post). Thanks to “Alas” reader Lee for the tip.

…People are perfectly willing to make generalizations about an entire gender based on one individual if they believe that a characteristic is associated with a person’s gender. Furthermore, and perhaps most strikingly, they’re willing to believe that a characteristic is associated with a person’s gender simply by learning that one male and one female differ in that characteristic.

They found that individuals who believed that homosexuality (male or female) was biologically based, immutable, and fixed early in life were the most “pro-gay,” while those who saw homosexuality as a discrete category with defining characteristics were the most “anti-gay.” This was particularly true of males, and Haslam and Levy argue that males may try to distance themselves from homosexuality by making it a discrete category of which you are either a member or not (with no fuzzy area in the middle).

To keep it simple, it seems to me the conservative notion that the two genders are essentially different and even our best efforts otherwise are betrayed by girls wanting Barbies and boys wanting trucks hits a direct stumbling block when they have to consider the unavoidable reality of homosexuality. On the subject of the color pink and the longing to wash dishes vs. go to a job every day, conservatives argue that men and women have fixed tendencies and there’s nothing we liberals can do about it. But on something so big as your very sexual orientation, all of a sudden they’re swearing it’s a choice, a lifestyle tendency and not fixed at all.

To keep it simple, it seems to me the conservative notion that the two genders are essentially different and even our best efforts otherwise are betrayed by girls wanting Barbies and boys wanting trucks hits a direct stumbling block when they have to consider the unavoidable reality of homosexuality. On the subject of the color pink and the longing to wash dishes vs. go to a job every day, conservatives argue that men and women have fixed tendencies and there’s nothing we liberals can do about it. But on something so big as your very sexual orientation, all of a sudden they’re swearing it’s a choice, a lifestyle tendency and not fixed at all.

Whereas the liberals insist that men and women are exactly the same except for the sex organs, and that all racial and sexual differences are social constructs, except for the issue of sexual orientation, where they suddenly believe that some behaviors are indeed biologically determined.